Michiel Kleinnijenhuis1,2, Markus Barth1,3,
Daniel C. Alexander4, Anne-Marie van Cappellen van Walsum2,5,
David Gordon Norris1,3
1Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders
Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Netherlands; 2Department
of Anatomy, University Medical Centre St. Radboud, Nijmegen, Netherlands; 3Erwin
L. Hahn Institute for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Essen, Germany; 4Centre
for Medical Image Computing, Department of Computer Science, University
College London, London, United Kingdom; 5MIRA Institute for
Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, University of Twente, Enschede,
Netherlands
Diffusion
tensor tractography suffers from limited spatial resolution in the
reconstruction of white matter structure. Susceptibility weighted images
(SWI) also shows white matter structure, but can be acquired at a much higher
resolution. A method is proposed to inform the tractography algorithm with
gradient information (structure tensor) of the SWI intensity. Tracking was
informed by SWI by projecting the DT tracking direction onto the plane
orthogonal to the first eigenvector of the structure tensor. Main pathways
were largely similar for DT and SWI-informed tractography, but tracts also
showed marked differences between branching patterns and tract paths.